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Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2037

What about Qt? It is the gold standard for cross-platform desktop UI frameworks.

It is (1) performant (C++-based), (2) does not look outdated, and (3) not bug-ridden.

Qt apps don't feel great on macOS, though it's by far the best for mac-ish UI. Dropbox was Qt for a long time and I'd argue it worked well for them. Its easy to fall into "uncanny valley".

On Linux, Qt apps feel a bit off in GNOME, though you can never satisfy everyone as its the wild west.

I think Qt also suffers from not really being anyone's favourite.

On the one hand, you have web developers who tend to not really appreciate the nuance of the desktop as a platform. They're not going to advocate for Qt, it's not CSS/HTML/JS.

On the other hand, you have native Mac developers who love Apple's toolkits (AppKit, maybe SwiftUI). They're not going to advocate for Qt either.

Lastly, you have native Windows developers who have been burned so many times they don't advocate for anything in life anymore.

> On Linux, Qt apps feel a bit off in GNOME, though you can never satisfy everyone as its the wild west.

It's much better than how GTK apps feel under Qt-based DEs - at least Qt tries to adapt to the DE style.

    > Lastly, you have native Windows developers who have been burned so many times they don't advocate for anything in life anymore.

Bollocks.

DotNet WinForms has been rock solid for 15 years. And there are so many good 3rd party widgets if you need them.

If you prefer C++, then Windows Template Library (WTL) is also rock solid and released more than 20 years ago.

I think Qt is only missing well-written, feature-complete bindings for a major JS runtime, including support for hot reload.

Developing UIs without hot reloading is too painful.

I think what you're asking for has existed for a long, long time. QML.

QML doesn't have a way to define interfaces with JSX and doesn't integrate with the wider JS tooling. From my very limited experience, it still feels too close to the C++ world.

This isn't true, but I understand why you feel that way.

Qt had bindings to many languages, C++ is a choice, not a demand, if you'd like to use Qt.

> This isn't true, but I understand why you feel that way.

By all means, I'd be happy to be proven wrong. Last effort I saw on this direction was node-gui + React. I believe that project isn't being maintained. Being able to use something like Vite to build desktop programs would be a blessing.

QML is an entirely separate widget toolkit that really isn't a great fit for desktop programs - it's not much different from using a web-based toolkit.

In my experience:

- Qt Widgets worked fine, but looked like a piece of software made in 2013;

- QML looks stylish and is a very nice language, but had a lot of weird bugs.

Neither of these are issues I'd run with if I were to make a web app.

Widgets looks like whatever you want them to look like, if the feel like they're from the 2010s its because the implementer made that choice, not because of a limitation in qtwidgets.

Could be, but I am mostly speaking about the fact that making a web app looks stylish feels infinitely easier to me.

Qt uses css. Its no different than what you’re describing.

As I understand the philosophy of Qt, it does not (for the most part) use native widgets. They seek to draw widgets that match native widgets on a pixel-by-pixel basis. You can also change the look-and-feel (similar to Java Swing widgets) by using what Qt calls "styles". Ref: https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/style-reference.html

> - Qt Widgets worked fine, but looked like a piece of software made in 2013;

That's too bad, because I prefer software which looks like it was made in 1999.

Ah, the magic times when screen resolutions were large enough to display lots of information, in proper 4:3 aspect ratio, just before they got flattened and the industry started treating them as short view distance TVs.

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